Analysis: The PM is in Vietnam to get Britain access to the fastest growing middle class in south-east Asia,but there’s a wider diplomatic game afoot, tooThe glorious French colonial architecture of the presidential palace in Hanoi, and once the headquarters of the governor general of French Indochina,has long had a modern twist, with a giant bust of the Vietnamese war leader Ho Chi Minh at one close of the corridor that is decorated with chandeliers, and dark marble pillars and 19th-century curved windows.
There is of course the Vietnamese flag – red with a single large yellow star in the middle. But this week,standing beside it was the union jack, marking the first ever visit by a British prime minister to a country that had always been seen as a preserve of the French.
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Source: theguardian.com